Behind The Mandalorian and Grogu, there are visual effects that are mixed with cutting-edge tech and old-school tricks in Hollywood.
Lifting the hood from the film’s secret, John Knoll, the movie’s VFX supervisor, said director Jon Favreau wanted the retro approach.
The expert hinted at using an expansive set of technology and not restricting at one such as CGI or LED stages in filmmaking.
“Best tool for the job—that’s always been the credo for this show,” he told IndieWire.
Knoll further explained, “With the one twist being that [director] Jon [Favreau] really likes having a bit of a handcrafted look.”
The visual effects supervisor, who had been working with Star Wars since The Phantom Menace, said they used a custom LED cube to film miniature spaceship scenes.
“From the beginning of the series, I’d wanted to have an LED volume for shooting miniatures in, so for this movie we built an 8-foot-by-8-foot LED cube, with one face open so we could get accurate reflections and realistic lighting on our characters and sets, in-camera.”
This, in turn, showed reflections on Mando’s armor and the Razor Crest starship.
He continued, “I had this gorgeous 48-inch model of the bare metal ship, so if we’re flying amongst clouds, we made sure that you’re seeing clouds reflected on the side of the ship.”
“For the same reason, we would shoot Mando in the LED environment, instead of [in front of] a blue screen, to get all those reflections on his highly polished armor,” Knoll concluded.
The Mandalorian and Grogu in cinemas.